Here, going, gone?

It struck me earlier in the week that I hadn’t checked the ‘blogroll’ of sites to which I link from here. So, on Wednesday (5 December), I checked through them.

Of the 22 blogs by people I know in real-life, three no longer exist at all. Nine haven’t seen new posts since Easter – making their sites at best ‘dormant’. Only four have posted in the past month.

Things are slightly better with the 23 other blogs to which I had links – including ones where I may know some of the authors online but not personally. Two of those no longer exist: six haven’t had new posts in over six months; the remainder have all had at least one update since September.

So, roughly in total: 10% of my favourite blogs have ceased to exist altogether; 33% more are no longer active. Many of the rest are updated very infrequently. Is the spankosphere dying?

It’s perhaps inevitable that some blogs burn out after (say) an initial burst of sharing and exploring. I know many of my blogging friends have moved on both in their life priorities and the nature of their friendships with people who happen to be kinky, as well as in their use of social media such as Twitter to interact with friends they’ve met through blogs and the scene. So perhaps this was bound to happen.

Or, rather, am I just out of touch? Are there lots of fresh, new blogs out there that I’m missing? I’d welcome any recommendations.

Hi – you’re right: Bonnie does list lots, but I’ve not found that many there that have caught my imagination. By their very nature, they tend to be new and hence don’t have much content – and some don’t then seem to survive that long. Good reminder to check there more often, but still very interested in any specific recommendations people may have

I wander if there is a link between the disappearance of some blogs and Twitter or such – I may be biased since I’m neither on Twitter nor Tumblr, but I still think that different media are not necessarily fit to kinky communication.
I definitely don’t think that spankosphere is dying, there may just be some fluctuation. There are still lots of graet blog in English. Even in the tiny French language spankosphere I know better, after a moment of very low activity when only several blogs kept active and regular, we recently had to new and dynamic blogs born.

I don’t know…I really want to post, but I guess I’m at a difficult moment in my life and I don’t really have anything to say. And, life gets busy at times. I guess, for most people, it’s much easier to update twitter or tumblr than to find something interesting to say on their own blog. Posting regularly is not as easy at it seems.

Dying is a strong word, but I’ve seen significant declines in traffic at Spanking Blog, and even bigger declines in comments, linkbacks, and overall community participation. Twitter and other social media is surely a part of this, plus as well the migration to smartphones; one consequence of that trend is less time spent “surfing the web” in general.

However, there’s still a great mass of new material entering the internet spankosphere every day. It’s just a lot more diffuse and harder to find than it used to be. People don’t organize their kinky lives into kinky silos as much as they used to, either; rather than having a conveniently-linkable kinky blog where they put all their kinky stuff, they just have kinky nuggets in their regular blogs, tweets, FB posts, FetLife, Pinterest, Tumblrs, and {insert endless litany of social media sites here}. And many of those are walled gardens; if it’s on FetLife it’s invisible to the open web, and many other social media sites aren’t friendly to direct links from outside either, or they aren’t readily searchable, or both.

Combine that with Google actively stripping anything it thinks might be porn from all but the most long-tail multi-keyword searches, and the spankosphere gets a lot harder to see. It’s still there, even larger maybe, but less dense and much harder to keep track of.